Abstract

The subject of Stefan Collini's Absent Minds is a “rich tradition of debate about the question of intellectuals” in twentieth-century Britain, in particular debate about “their absence or comparative insignificance”. The debate begins with the Dreyfus Affair and its unpredictable British reception, simmers intriguingly through the 1920s and 1930s, and becomes positively effervescent in the 1950s, perhaps because of a new democratization of the public sphere. Collini is less interested in the possible historical causes than in the rhetorical structure that persists, swirling around figures as different as T. S. Eliot, R. G. Collingwood, George Orwell, A. J. P. Taylor, and A. J. Ayer, each of whom gets a full-length profile. Other chapters mix shorter profiles—for example, the devastatingly funny discussion of Colin Wilson and the authorities who briefly and embarrassingly made him a star in their firmament—with synthesis of the debate over intellectuals at different scales and in different national settings. Coming closer to the present, Collini admires Edward Said for what he did as an intellectual while disputing what he said about intellectuals—a celebration of rigorous exile from all social belonging, which could only leave the category of the intellectual looking almost totally uninhabited. The move turns out to be characteristic: it is as if Collini felt he could win a proper admiration for what intellectuals do only by rejecting most of their self-images, or evasion thereof.